Today's internet searching is a tedious task that typically begins with interrogating a search engine with queries, reviewing the response to the query, then ranking and classifying, until a suitable set is achieved. For each new search, this painstaking process is repeated by every person or a computer program looking for information on the internet. Each user individually submits queries and separately reviews the results. This process is repeated a multitude of times, even if thousands of other users already searched for the same thing and had already paired the search response from the search engine down to the same or similar set. The present invention will help unify internet searching that is presently being conducted in a disconnected fashion.
Presently collaborative search method must be undertaken contemporaneously, or by a group of searchers working together on a common goal. However, once each member tries a separate and unrelated search, this member will no longer benefit from a team effort, and will instead be forced into the traditional, individual effort of identifying relevant information from millions of probable results. The present invention is particularly useful for scientific and engineering research, where searching tends to be complex and multi-tiered. Currently collaborative research can only be undertaken by universities and think tanks and has to be especially funded due to resources and time involved. However, students or doctorate candidates, who do not have sufficient resources to fund such collaboration, are presently forced to do all of their electronic research alone. Therefore, a pool of prior searches from, for example several schools or campuses, which functions passively and autonomously will be a tremendous low cost enhancement for such uses.
The present invention revolutionizes data searching by creating a constant, passive team of research collaborators where individual search results are available for look-up and review by other participants. It would be preferable potential members are required to agree or consent to participate in the search network. Once consent is obtained. it would not matter which particular searches are going to be executed, alternatively a consent can be obtained prior to each search. Each search by the participants embodied in the present invention is able to access an existing bank of search results and can further improve or create a new set of search results. Instead of starting from scratch each time, each research effort improves an existing knowledge base.
In the preferred embodiment of the present invention there is no requirement for expensive computer processing and storage hardware since searches are stored on each client machine that ran the search, with just an identifying stub being sent to a central intelligence unit or to other intelligent clients. Any combination of data search request and the identifying stub creates a coordinate value of the member of the collaborative network. If the search result is lost or can no longer be accessed, the present query and similar subsequent queries will rebuilt this result for the particular collaborative search community by having the current user pair down results to the most relevant subset. In this manner all members have a common incentive in sharing their search results, because by sharing their search results now, they can avail themselves of search results in the future. Furthermore, the present invention does not require any guarantee accuracy or availability of information, since results can be created or supplemented at any point in the future through additional searching.